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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Several sites are reporting that the legendary programmer Bill Atkinson has died [wired.com]. He contributed QuickDraw to the early Macintosh and was even responsible for MacPaint and Hypercard [daringfireball.net]. The former, MacPaint, inspired Photoshop. The latter, Hypercard, can be considered an important milestone in computing even though it lacked the networking which the WWW is built upon.

He designed a program where information—text, video, audio—would be stored on virtual cards. These would link to each other. It was a vision that harkened back to a 1940s idea by scientist Vannevar Bush which had been sharpened by a technologist named Ted Nelson, who called the linking technique “hypertext.” But it was Atkinson who made the software work for a popular computer. When he showed the program, called HyperCard, to Apple CEO John Sculley, the executive was blown away, and asked Atkinson what he wanted for it. “I want it to ship,” Atkinson said. Sculley agreed to put it on every computer. HyperCard would become a forerunner of the World Wide Web, proof of the viability of the hyperlinking concept.

— Bill Atkinson, Macintosh Pioneer and Inventor of Hypercard, Dies at 74 [wired.com], Wired.

The Internet Archive has a digitized edition of a two part interview with him, recorded in 1985 and originally aired on KFOX.

• The Famous Computer Cafe 1985-01-08 Bill Atkinson : The Famous Computer Cafe [archive.org]
• The Famous Computer Cafe 1985-01-09 Bill Atkinson : The Famous Computer Cafe [archive.org]

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